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Hijacked airliners are crashed into Twin Towers and Pentagon

09/12/01

BY MARY JO PATTERSONSTAR-LEDGER STAFF

Terrorists bent on suicide and mass murder struck at the heart of the nation's military and financial centers yesterday morning, crashing hijacked jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

In the four jetliners, 266 passengers and crew lost their lives. Thousands more were feared dead in the smoking rubble the planes left behind in New York, including 200 city firefighters and many police officers.

One jet flew into the Pentagon in Arlington, Va., dissolving an entire wing of the U.S. government's military command center. Two slammed into the twin 110-story towers of the World Trade Center, toppling them in flames and darkening the sky with ash and smoke. A fourth jetliner went down in western Pennsylvania. Where it was headed was not known.

"Today our nation saw evil, the very worst of human nature, and we responded with the best of America," President Bush said last night from the White House. "Terrorist acts can shake the foundation of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America."

Bush said the country's military is powerful and prepared. "We have stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget this day, but we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world."

Earlier in the day, Bush had been whisked into hiding, along with key administration officials and members of Congress. The President put the military on its highest level of alert, dispatched the Navy's aircraft carriers and guided-missile destroyers to New York and Washington, and called thousands of National Guardsmen to duty. He also sealed the country's Canadian and Mexican borders.

Terrorism experts identified Osama bin Laden as the chief suspect. Federal officials said there was no warning of a plot and no credible claim of responsibility. World leaders, including Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, condemned the attacks, but some Palestinians celebrated on the West Bank, handing out candy and chanting, "God is great."

The swift sequence of assaults, timed to fall as the East Coast went to work, made up the most devastating terrorist attack ever launched on the United States.

In New York City alone, there were predictions that thousands had died. Estimates dwarfed the misery of Oklahoma City, where 168 died in a bombing in 1995. It also invited comparisons to Pearl Harbor, where 2,403 U.S. sailors died in 1941.

Chaos very nearly paralyzed New York and Washington. As crowds of people seeking safety struggled to leave, others surged toward the disaster sites, seeking loved ones. Streets and highways locked; police used guns to ward off trouble. The rest of the nation, meanwhile, slowed or froze while trying to make sense of the terrorism.

In most places, everyday life ground to a halt. Financial and government centers shut down, the skies were cleared of all traffic, and many offices evacuated their workers. Disney World closed, colleges canceled classes, and churches began planning memorial services.

Terrible scenes played out in the canyons of New York's financial district.

Immediately after the crashes, the dead rained silently from burning skyscrapers, and the desperate leaped to their death before horrified onlookers. A man and a woman were seen holding hands as they dropped through the air.

Maimed workers who made it out alive, some with skin peeling off their bodies, flailed their arms and begged for help. Harris Lam, a 29-year-old budget analyst with the city of New York who was driving by the World Trade Center complex with his girlfriend when the first plane hit at 8:45 a.m., saw a man in a business suit and with a briefcase, and engulfed in flames. He turned and saw a woman who was burning from the waist up.

Among the thousands of people playing roles in the tragedy, one emerged as a heroine. Sometime before 9:45 a.m., Barbara Olson, wife of U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson and a passenger on American Airlines Flight 77 out of Washington Dulles bound for Los Angeles, called her husband twice shortly after takeoff.

Her first call was cut off, according to CNN. She redialed, got her husband and calmly told him her plane had been hijacked. Then, in another call, she alerted the Justice Department command center. She said that passengers and the crew, including the pilot, had been herded to the back of the plane and that some flight attendants had been stabbed.

She also said that the hijackers seemed to be armed only with box cutters and knives, CNN reported.

Olson died when the aircraft slammed into the Pentagon, as did everyone else on board. The same fate awaited passengers on the three other planes -- American Flight 11, bound to Los Angeles from Boston, which crashed into a World Trade Center tower; United Airlines Flight 175, also en route to Los Angeles from Boston, which crashed into the other tower; and United Flight 93, flying from Newark to San Francisco, which crashed and burned a crater in the ground 80 miles south of Pittsburgh.

Within two hours of the first roar and shudder, the string of attacks had obliterated the World Trade Center's famous rectangular towers -- housing 50,000 workers and the city's new emergency preparedness center -- and reduced one wing of the U.S. government's fortress-like military headquarters to ash. The attacks also killed an as-yet unknown number of workers and others in both cities, and wounded thousands more.

It was the second time the World Trade Center had been a target for terrorism. On Feb. 26, 1993, a truck bomb killed six people and wounded about 1,000.

On the ground in Washington and New York, wailing sirens, clouds of smoke, piles of white-gray ash and hundreds of dazed, bleeding and weeping people transformed city streets into a war zone.

Shell-shocked people like Gil Faggen of Manhattan, who had been in a restaurant one block from the crash site, witnessed horrifying sights. Faggen, seated inside a restaurant at One Financial Center, saw a giant piece of metal hit a pedestrian, and he ran outside. Body parts, organs, and part of a plane's landing gear were strewn over the pavement; seeing this, he struggled to breathe.

By 10:30 a.m., both of the Twin Towers had collapsed into a mountain of rubble, trapping an unknown number of victims and robbing the city of its famous skyline.

On Broadway, perhaps 10 blocks away, Michael Zhu, 33, of South Plainfield stood on the street, shaking and sobbing. He had been working in his office inside One World Trade Center when the first plane crashed.

Zhu had been checking his e-mail when he heard a huge boom. The tower started to shake, he said, and he thought he was in the middle of an earthquake. He looked out a window, saw debris and flames shooting out from the building, and ran toward the stairs. It took him 40 minutes to run down 51 flights.

Now, all he could think of was getting home to his wife and 1-year-old daughter. "I just want to get back to my baby. I feel like I am going to die," he cried.

Inez Graham, 40, a Port Authority employee who had been in a training class on the 61st floor of the first tower hit, suffered minor injuries in the blast and got into an ambulance waiting on the street below. As a loud rumbling shook the area, the ambulance technicians told her to run. She jumped out.

"It just got black," she said, "and I just thought I was going to die. I thought that was it. It was horrible. People were yelling, 'Cover your face, cover your face!' They poured water on us." She was eventually transported to University Hospital in Newark, where she was treated for burning in her chest and throat and was decontaminated.

Michael O'Connor, an Edison resident with offices on the 45th floor of Two World Trade Center, was in Greenwich Village looking for a pay phone to call his wife, Anne. He had escaped the tower, carrying his wallet and bag, by filing down the building's stairwell in a virtual mob of people.

O'Connor reached his wife but, with a long line of frantic people behind him, cut the call short and caught a subway to Journal Square in Jersey City. Arriving home, he hugged his wife and children. He worried about colleagues on the 101st floor. Then he relived the horror on television.

As the hours passed, disaster officials said they feared the worst.

"Thousands of people are dying. They can't get them out of the rubble," said Ron Weiss, an emergency room doctor on loan to St. Vincent's Hospital and Medical Center at Manhattan.

A temporary morgue was set up at the World Financial Center. Preliminary reports put the number of injured in the thousands. New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said 1,500 "walking wounded" were moved to Liberty State Park in Jersey City for treatment.

The aftershocks rocked the entire nation, for millions of Americans were glued to their TVs, watching the terror escalate throughout the day. In malls, airport waiting rooms, in homes and in schools, they witnessed the devastation in real time, never knowing when it would be over -- or if it would spread.

Fear of more buildings collapsing hampered efforts to rescue people believed trapped in the rubble. That fear became reality around 5:30 p.m., when a third building in the World Trade Center, No. 7, collapsed amid a fresh cloud of white dust.

Thousands of people bound for New Jersey, meanwhile, found themselves virtually trapped at the West 38th Street ferry terminal, waiting up to six hours for boats to take them home.

Virtually every hospital in Manhattan, as well as others in the outer boroughs and New Jersey, were accepting the dead and injured.

As search crews frantically worked their way through rubble at the base of the Trade Center, looking for trapped firefighters and office workers, Giuliani predicted the death toll would not be known for days.

"People are trapped, and our primary efforts are to get them out," he said during an impromptu news conference at St. Vincent Hospital and Medical Center downtown. He said 200 people were critically wounded at city hospitals and 400 others were less seriously hurt.

Offsetting the grim scenes throughout the day were joyful reunions in homes and on the telephone.

Matthew Sellitto received a phone call at his Harding home at nearly 8:55 a.m. from his 23-year-old son, Matt, a brokerage firm worker on the 103rd floor of the first tower struck by a plane.

"He said: 'Dad, did you hear what happened? A plane hit the Trade Center. I've got to get out of here. But I just wanted to let you know, if I don't make it, I love you and Mom.'

"That's it -- then he hung up," Sellitto said later, after a special service for victims outside the Church of Christ the King in Harding.

Tears streamed down Sellitto's face. "I drove him to the train station today at Convent Station at 5 in the morning. He kissed me goodbye. Told me he loved me and he got out of the car. The next thing I got was the phone call. It makes you think."

It was not until the second airliner crash, 18 minutes after the first tower was struck, that fear and panic spread.

New York-bound commuters stepping into Journal Square, for example, sighed when they heard an announcement that no trains were being allowed into the World Trade Center because a plane had just hit a tower. They began devising alternate routes.

At One New York Plaza in Manhattan, where the morning meeting of convertible-bond traders was already winding up on the 50th floor, the shocking news interrupted business -- but only for 10 minutes.

"Somebody yelled, 'A plane hit the World Trade Center!'" said Jim Kenney, a 34-year-old bond trader from Morris Township. He and his colleagues ran to the north side of their building to look but soon returned to their desks.

Then came the second, sickening crash.

"For some reason, I had gone back to the window, and this plane came out of the corner of my eye, this jumbo jet; it was going as fast as it could be," Kenney said. "It slammed into the tower and exploded. There was chaos, it was apparent that something was incredible wrong. Everybody ran. We didn't know if the world was coming to an end -- if they were coming to every downtown building."

Medical experts said identifying the dead would be a huge and difficult task.

"It's likely there will be some victim fragments, or some victims burned beyond recognition as human," said Jonathan L. Arden, former first deputy medical chief medical examiner in New York City and now chief medical examiner in Washington, D.C.

Medical examiners will need DNA testing, as well as examining tattoos, dental records and jewelry, to make some identifications, he said.

By nightfall, most of the fires were extinguished but the air was still acrid with smoke. Firefighters and police walked through ankle-deep ash in the streets near where the great towers had stood.

Twisted pieces of metal that were once cars sat here and there, unrecognizable. A parked bus was a skeleton, with windows, seats, and the rubber from its tires blown out. Piles of ash were more than a foot high.

There were no street lights or bright signs. The only illumination was from searchlights that played around the charred nub of the World Trade Center complex -- a few stories of twisted steel framing where a pair of skyscrapers, 110 stories tall, had stood a few hours earlier.